


when all the lights go out

by humboldt syd the tentacle kid (hellalugosisdead)



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-04-30 20:22:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5178389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellalugosisdead/pseuds/humboldt%20syd%20the%20tentacle%20kid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Uncover your eyes,” he says. “Look at who I am. I deserve to be known.”</p><p>Two kids watch from the rooftops as their city turns against them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> so i wrote this as an independent ficlet sometime last week and it got an unexpectedly great response on tumblr. i decided to continue it, but i can tell it's going to be a real pain to keep the chapters in order with the tumblr text post format, so it's going here. i'm a sucker for the whole "you and me against the world" thing.
> 
> you teenage believers, rallied up against the fence  
> use weapons of clairvoyance  
> you adolescent strike force...  
> \- maya the psychic - gerard way

“I couldn’t do it,” Chat says. “I couldn’t steal. I left the money on the counter. There’s some crackers, protein bars, water bottles, a blanket. Peroxide and gauze for the cuts and bruises.”

He’s wearing a rubber Halloween mask, a witch’s face left in the clearance section. This is the only thing they have left between them - the dignity of a secret identity. “So which mask do you want?” he asks. “I brought…let’s see. I have a sparkly butterfly, but that only covers the eyes, and a giant baby head.”

“I’m not wearing a giant baby head,” Ladybug sniffs from the corner, where she’s huddled under an outsize sweatshirt, facing the wall. “I’ll take the butterfly.”

He obliges, and a moment later she turns, sparkly purple butterfly wings surrounding her eyes, her hair loosed from its usual pigtails. It fluffs up around her face, but under the edges of the mask there are tear streaks. Gingerly, Chat - now just Adrien in a cheap party mask - reaches for her hand and weaves it with his. “I still think it will be alright,” he says. “When we’ve got the akuma, his influence will fade, and then they’ll forget all about hating us. Give me your ankle and I’ll work on that scrape.”

“I don’t know,” Ladybug says, scooting back, placing a bared ankle across his knees. It’s really more like a gash. Rusty dried blood has migrated down one pale foot, with wiggly toes painted pale pink. “I was always afraid this would happen. When they’d stop writing blogs and making balloons with our faces on them, and then start asking why we won’t reveal ourselves, what kind of terrible secrets we have, why we can’t do more than we do. And how can we tell them? How can we tell them we’re just kids?” Her voice cracks again. “I mean, you are just a kid, right, Chat? You don’t seem like you can be much older than me.”

“I’m fifteen,” he says, drifting into another place, where Nino is climbing into a warm bed after a hot dinner surrounded by his siblings, and Marinette’s family are sweeping the bakery floor, and everyone else he knows is engaged in the mundane and wonderful. “I should be going to school tomorrow.”

She cackles, then winces at the sensation of the peroxide Adrien dabs gingerly onto her wound. “I had a math test tomorrow that I was sure I was going to fail. And now? My parents are probably losing their minds.”

“You could send them a message,” Adrien says, wheels spinning. “I know the girl who runs the Ladyblog. Of course, she doesn’t know I know her. You could email her through the blog and ask her to -“  
“You know Alya?”  
“You know Alya?”

They pause and appraise each other, each in their bargain disguises. “If I lifted that mask,” she says, “I wonder just what I’d find. And yet I have a hunch.”  
“I do too,” Adrien says. His pulse is stabbing so hard his breath barely makes it into his lungs and back out again. He trembles at the prospect of knowing just who the Ladybug - who this marvel of a girl - could be. And something in him whispers the answer. 

“There,” he says shakily, taping a square of gauze over the cut.

She carefully withdraws her foot. “But let’s…keep the masks on,” she says. “I don’t know about you, but if I’m right…it’s one more complication that we just don’t need right now. And besides,” she says quietly, sadly, “Alya wants nothing more than to know who I am. If she hasn’t already figured it out by now, by Ladybug going missing at the same time as the civilian girl she knows, then me sending a message will tell her, and I can’t expose myself. Not now. I don’t know if I could trust even Alya with this.”

“I can’t do this.”  
“What?”  
“I want you to know who I am.” His skin makes a weird squelchy sound as it sucks away from the inside of the mask.  
“No, no, no!” She claps her hands over her eyes. “Don’t make me look!”

“Lady,” he whispers, shaking free rain-dirtied hair and utterly un-intimidating face. “What are you afraid of? That I won’t be amazing without the mask on?” That’s not fair, he wants to say. Why should she be disappointed with something she always knew was there? Why can’t Adrien matter just as much as Chat Noir?

“No,” she says in a mousy, defeated voice. “The opposite, actually.”

“What does that even mean?! It’s just a face. Even if you can already put it to a name, you know me better than almost anyone else, and I need someone to know me! All of me! Especially now.” He hears the crack in his own voice and realizes with a start that he’s crying. Maybe it’s hunger, maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s the strain of confronting the fact that not a soul in the world knows both Chat Noir and Adrien Agreste.

“Oh, no, Chat, don’t cry,” Lady says. “If you cry, I’ll cry, and then we’ll all just be crying. Too late. Now you’ve done it.” 

“Uncover your eyes,” he says. “Look at who I am. I deserve to be known.”

Ladybug sits very still. Adrien doesn’t rush her. “Okay,” she says. “For you.” And she uncovers the eyeholes of her butterfly mask.

Adrien doesn’t know what he expected. A gasp? A sob? Disappointment?  
“My name is Adrien Agreste,” he says. “My dad owns this building. That’s how I knew it would be empty. The offices down below are safe to sleep in.”

Ladybug does not make a sound. She extends her fingertips, traces them down the side of his face from temple to chin. She shakes her head as if in response to voices within herself.

Adrien finds suddenly that he cannot hold himself awake. The plastic coverings on the outer perimeter of the building flap in the night breeze. A siren sounds somewhere in the distance. “Well,” he says. “Now you know. I’m going to bed. We can figure out what to do in the morning.” He stands, extends his arms over his head, and gives a long moment of stretch and release from his neck to his toes. Lady still doesn’t talk.

After Adrien has been gone half an hour, Marinette stands and brushes the construction dust from the backs of her legs. The office isn’t difficult to find, since Adrien’s left the door open for her. She shucks off her shoes and plops cross-legged on the floor to watch him breathe. Who is missing him tonight? Is his father afraid for him the way hers must be?

Marinette feels eons older. There’s no time for childish drama any longer. There is no room for the idealized Adrien of her dreams. There is only this small square space, with blinking computer lights and monitor hums, and a sad and messy Adrien trying as best he can to heal. 

There’s enough room under the blanket for her to curl up under it without getting too close. She pulls the edge around her. Reverently, as if performing a rite, she removes the mask. She places it on the floor beside her, silences her uncertainty, and rolls over into sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> we find adrien and marinette angsting and eating cold chef boyardee

“It’s finished,” Marinette says, having licked the envelope closure. All the words inside are not enough.

(Dear Mom and Dad, please forgive me.)

“What?” The worry hasn’t departed Adrien’s brow all day. 

“The message for my parents,” she says. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say.” 

(I promise I’ll come home.)

This morning she woke in a groggy haze, with a beam of cold white cloud-light falling over her eyes. Her whole face felt puffy. She had migrated two feet closer to Adrien during the night, and now his nose was maybe seven inches from hers, and he was just taking her in. She felt exposed, stripped of protection. 

“Well,” she said, parroting his statement from the previous night. “Now you know.”

And he shrugged off the blanket and went to look at himself in the faint reflection offered by the window. There was a patch of bloody matted hair behind his ear, a faint black eye, and he was too pale. He moved stiffly, bruises splotched across his visible skin. “We look like shit,” he said. And that was that.

Now that ominous nonchalance makes Marinette feel that something lurks. 

She hugs herself, then grabs her unwounded ankle, contorting her body to stare at the back of it. The little beetle perched there is marvelous, even sunken into her flesh the way it is. It is about the size of the nail on her pinky finger, jade green with gilt-trimmed edges. If she listens with intent, she swears she can hear tiny whirrings, maybe made by tiny gears. This minuscule machine is a work of art, and you could believe it was alive. That’s what’s so scary about the Mindbender - he is a master of illusory art, of detail and precision and fooling the eye. This little mechatronic beetle is a perfect example of art corrupted. 

They don’t know exactly what the beetle does, really. Only that, likely as not, it’s doing some kind of tracking, and that means that anywhere their families are is out of the question. Already she feels the weight of the people who have already been hurt by her transgressions real and imagined. The truth about what she saw and what she did exists somewhere, but for now there’s no way to tell what is concocted by Mindbender. Chat may not be as bothered, but then Chat doesn’t have to worry if he’s got blood on his hands.

Adrien. Adrien doesn’t have to worry.

“Kitty?” Adrien? Chat? Which one?  
He starts at the use of the old endearment. He looks sad for a moment, then melts back into quiet irritation. “Yeah?”

“What if we don’t come back?”

“Then our families are in for a world of hurt.” Seeing the pain on Marinette’s face, he adds, “You know I want to say that it can’t happen, that we always get the bad guy in the end. But Ladybug and Chat Noir have died before.” His voice is bitter.

“I know,” she murmurs, and he softens. 

“I’m sorry I said that,” Adrien says.

“No,” says Marinette. “You’re right.” She hasn’t redone her pigtails, and she knows her hair is ratty. She can feel the puffiness under her eyes. She knows she looks like hell.

“Adrien?” She asks again, prying open a can of Spaghetti-Os and meatballs and eating them cold with a plastic spoon.

“What?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

(I didn’t run away on purpose.)

She sort of wants him to do something Chat Noir-ish, like come to her and put his chin on her shoulder and tell her a dumb joke, or maybe slip a wayward arm around her shoulders and flick her on the nose, but instead he just says, “Do you think that I do?”

“I think you’re my friend,” she says, “or at least you’re supposed to be. And I was looking for a little support.”

He shrugs, shoulders low. “Sorry about that too.”

“Are you angry? At me, I mean?” The tension in his form, his distance, the way nothing about his behavior can be reconciled with that of blithe, cocky Chat Noir - all of it unsettles Marinette. He hasn’t tried to touch her once since they woke up this morning. Usually he’d lay a stray hand on her back, trace her vertebrae with his fingers, smirk too close to her face and fiddle with strands of her hair. But now she catches him stopping himself. Reaching out a hand and then withdrawing it. He must feel shortchanged, says the voice. After all, where is the charm in simple Marinette, the clingy baby who stumbles over her words?

“Why would I be angry?”

Because I’m not what you thought I was. Because I’m not enough. Because you’ve been fooled. 

“I don’t know,” she says.

He stares at his feet for a moment, and then says, “I know what you mean. About the not coming back, that is. You’re wondering, what if I’m lying when I promise to come back? If we’re killed, what happens to our memories? Do our families need answers, or would it hurt less for them not to know? And I don’t think so. I think someone has to be left with our secrets. And I have an idea about how to do it.” He points to a webcam. “We make a video explaining everything,” he says. “And we give it to someone we can trust, someone who won’t believe what they’re saying about us, and who can tell the world if need be.”

“Alya,” Marinette breathes.

“Or Nino,” Adrien says. 

“Both.”

Adrien nods. “And then,” he says, “if everything goes belly up - if we die…”

“Then Alya and Nino will put out the video and the people will know the truth. For better or for worse. Maybe that will be enough to save them.”  
Marinette nods.

“And My La— Marinette?” 

“Hmm?” She tries not to sound injured, wanting more than anything to hear him call her My Lady again without hesitating.

“I…I know I’m not myself. I’d probably be able to be better to you if we weren’t squatting in a skyscraper, living on cold beans and waiting to die, do you know what I mean?”

She flinches at the word ‘die,’ but then feels the barest hint of a smile return to her face. “Yes, Adrien. I know what you mean. We’ll have time to sort this whole mess out when we’re safe again.”

(I have work left to do.)

There are flaws in the plan, of course - for one, the possibility of someone recovering the video from the computer’s memory - but it’s the best they can do for now. And so Adrien fiddles with the webcam while Marinette takes deep breaths, thinking of what to say.

“It’s ready,” he says. “I’m about to record. Okay, go.”

Marinette nods, takes a shaky breath, and looks into the camera. “My name is Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” she says, “and if you’re watching this…” She glances over at Adrien, uncertain, treading over words like crossbeams in an attic. Don’t step on the wrong spot. He nods back at her, and then takes a seat beside her. She’s lost for a moment in the silence, the enormity of this moment falling on her. This is her last testament. To who she is, to what she stands for, to the people she loves. Simultaneously, something in her speaks peace, because whatever this hurt is between them, it can be repaired.

Adrien’s hand slips into hers and squeezes, warm and honest. He bends in close to her ear, not for the camera to hear. “Go on,” he says. His breath dusts over her jaw.

(I could not have asked for better people to love me and make me who I am.)

She raises her eyes again, dry and fearless. And she begins to speak.

(Love, 

Marinette.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> marinette and adrien know something in their lives is a little off, but neither has the words to say what - or what it has to do with what happened six months ago

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this may seem a little out of left field, but be patient, guys - it's important to the plot  
> (also i know it's been a crazy long time since i updated...what can i say, my writing process is a shitshow)  
> ALSO ALSO - i'm no longer reachable at the same place on tumblr because i like to delete and restart now and then. it's nbd if you find me there, because it's not a secret, but it's just a personal blog with me kicking memes around and stuff

Her mother doesn’t like her walking alone anywhere at all, after what happened a few months ago, but Marinette puts it down to loving paranoia. Sure, it was a close call, but she’s not damaged. Especially since she was out of it the whole time. Isn’t it a good thing that she escaped trauma? Of course she wants to know where the dreams come from, but that’s Marinette’s secret to keep close.

Paris is awash in hazy light, and everything is smoldering gold. A trio of jazz guitarists pluck at their strings around a bench while a basketball thumps in time. Her dress is butter-yellow and swishes around her knees. In her hands are a travel mug of hot black tea and a fresh croissant with jam. This morning is the smell of bergamot and fresh bread. Alya will be waiting for her, and they’ll giggle about Alya’s ongoing flirtation with Nino Lahiffe and other serious orders of business. It’s hard to believe anything bad could have touched her life at all, when everything seems so bright. 

“Your boyfriend hasn’t done a shoot in a long time,” Alya says when Marinette slides into her seat. Tall windows let sunlight bathe the classroom, and the warmth in Marinette’s chest hasn’t dissipated. The seat in front of Marinette, beside Nino, is empty – someone used to occupy it, but he left the class and Marinette hasn’t thought about him in a long time and doesn’t remember his name. So Nino, Alya and Marinette are the resident trio of whisperers.

“I know,” Marinette says. “He’s probably taking personal time. He’s a hard worker.”

Alya snorts. “You seem very certain of his moral fiber.”

“I am,” she replies, and busies herself with sharpening a pencil to a perfect point, touching up her lipgloss, and smoothing the loose black waves of hair around her cheeks. “He’s a perfect gentleman.” 

Alya smiles and shakes her head. Marinette cannot be dissuaded of Adrien Agreste’s strength of character. And of course it’s a game, a pastime – the teenage crush on a mythic celebrity. It fills that tiny lonely hole in her that she’s pretty sure every teenage girl has – isn’t longing for something unidentifiable just part of growing up? 

But sometimes when she sees the pictures of him tacked over her desk, she just knows. She knows he’s good, and that he would be good to her if she met him.

Nobody fills the empty seat, and nobody mentions it. 

//

Adrien cannot remember a time when he was not in the public eye, and at the same time cannot think of a single person who knows what he’s like in the moments after waking up.

Right now his hair is knotted, his eyes are puffy, and there’s a trail of toothpaste running down his chin. His shirt is glued to him – night sweats. They’ve been getting worse. He thinks he’s having nightmares, but he can’t remember what about.

It’s Friday – math day. He puts on his favorite old jeans and sneakers, still achingly fashionable but at least a little worn in, a little loved, unlike the parades of brand new clothes they used to stuff him into and pin and tape until he and the photos were perfectly edited. But he hasn’t done a shoot or a show in a long time.

He logs onto the university’s website, turns on the projector, and sits back in a beanbag chair, grabbing one of his many scattered notebooks and a pen from the floor. The professor, onscreen, enters the classroom, a man whose face droops like that of a Bassett hound, and wordlessly begins scrawling differential equations on the board. His students are tittering amongst themselves, laughing about this and that party antic and throwing granola bars to one another. Adrien knows them all by face and some by name, but none of them know him. 

No matter. He begins to copy down a model of radioactive decay, turning to growth parameters and integration and the graceful, structured magic of mathematics. 

There’s a curt knock on the door, but no pause to wait for an answer. “You didn’t come down to breakfast,” Nathalie says, inviting herself inside the room and almost stepping on a composition book – the one with the most detailed notes on Einsteinian physics.

“I didn’t want breakfast, Nathalie.”

“Your father expects you to be present at mealtimes,” she says. Nathalie is deliberately impersonal with him. He wants to throw things at her – bricks, maybe – and see if she flinches. Maybe she knows why his father suddenly canceled all his engagements six months ago and moved all his schooling to webcasts. Regular schooling didn’t work out and didn’t last long and he doesn’t remember a whole lot of it or think of it that often. 

“I wanted to sleep in until seven-thirty today,” he says, cool as a tile floor.

“See that you’re prompt for lunch.”

“Understood,” he murmurs, and goes back to his calculations. Fuck. He can’t remember anything about trigonometric substitution, and u-substitution doesn’t work here because there’s no y in the numerator. Shit. Fuck.

Class ends with the professor assigning a truly obnoxious set of integration problems – in other words, a fun hobby for Adrien, who will turn in his work by email – and Adrien bumping off down the stairs, dragging his feet and hanging on the banister and doing back walk-overs to the kitchen, where he inputs the secret key code to the pantry (that he isn’t supposed to know) and digs out a toaster pastry, which has half the recommended daily amount of fat in it and which he had to bribe the chef to keep in there for him.  
It’s these small mutinies – bringing in contraband, swinging from the chandeliers when nobody’s watching, busying himself with science, wearing rumpled sweaters – that sustain him. He’ll be shut up in this airy work of modern art until the day the sun implodes. Something shifted six months ago, though he’s not privy to the details. It couldn’t have been something he did. Gabriel wouldn’t miss an opportunity to tell him he’d fucked up.

“What is that?” The man in question is out of his office. As always, Gabriel is dressed exclusively in black and white, with no embellishment, and nothing but the cut and quality of his clothes to suggest that he might give them any thought. His business is other people’s clothes.

“Oh, this? This is breakfast,” Adrien says, motioning to the three crumbs on his chin, and brandishing his Pop Tart. 

He braces himself, but Gabriel only nods. “I see,” he says, and for the briefest of moments his rigidity looks less like composure and more like apprehension, awkwardness. Adrien has witnessed this tiny shift more often in the past few months.

There was a moment, after the incident, when he was trying to clean the cut on his face. It was difficult, with one arm in a plaster cast. The cut was fresh, and he winced as he dabbed peroxide over the stitches. He caught a glimpse of his father in the mirror, and started, and made some sort of indignant squeak. Gabriel didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, and didn’t meet Adrien’s eye, and after a long breath, he asked, “Would you like…do you need some help?”

And Adrien replied, “Oh, that’s okay. Nathalie does a lot. I don’t think she’ll want to clean up my bloody wounds, though.” And Gabriel looked, for a moment, just like he does now. And it wasn’t until later that Adrien realized he might have been offering to do it himself.

Now, the dearth of words between them is heavy. “I’ll be going, then,” Adrien says, and turns on his heel and walks the other way, toward the library, where he can find one of his stashed sci-fi novels. Gabriel massages the bridge of his nose, a black ring making itself apparent as his only accessory. 

It’s a peculiar ring. It’s got a cat’s paw print on it, if you look close at the engraving. His father only started wearing it recently.


End file.
